FSF announces fundraising support for GNU Guix, a new approach to GNU/Linux

This post was written by GNU Guix maintainer Ludovic Courtès and FSF executive director John Sullivan.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced that we would begin
accepting donations as part of our support for GNU Guix, a
dependable and customizable package manager, along with GuixSD, GNU's
advanced free GNU/Linux distribution. Donations will primarily go
to increasing the project's build farm capacity so it can manage the
growing number of packages and users.

There is no shortage of GNU/Linux distributions and package managers,
but GNU Guix and GuixSD distinguish themselves in several important
ways. As a package manager, Guix offers uncommon features such as
transactional upgrades and rollbacks -- users can run package
upgrades, possibly unattended, confident that they can roll back to
the previous state should the upgrade trigger bugs.

GuixSD, the Guix System Distribution, takes that to the level of the
complete operating system: instead of modifying configuration files
and other parts of the system state in a possibly irreversible
fashion, GuixSD sysadmins provide a declaration of what they
want the system to be like, and then instantiate it. The declaration
specifies details ranging from locale and timezone settings, mounted
file systems, and system services and their configuration. It can be
instantiated on the "bare metal" or in virtual machines or
containers, which simplifies testing.

Last but not least, Guix and GuixSD provide a unified set of
programming interfaces, making the whole system highly customizable.
The package recipes and build tools themselves are essentially
a set of libraries of GNU Guile, the host language. Core
parts of the system, from initialization code to system service
management, are similarly available as libraries.

The GNU Guix project was started three years ago. Today, Guix
provides almost 3,000 packages available on four hardware
platforms. GuixSD itself is in beta stage, currently targeted
primarily at experienced users. Its small developer community has been
growing continuously, with more than 50 people who contributed
packages or code in 2015, and a number of people helping with the key
tasks of localization, Web design, and artwork.

In addition to funding, GNU Guix needs more developers. Interested
hackers are invited to join the #guix IRC channel on
irc.freenode.net or the project's
other communication channels. The Web site's
contribution page lists the technical and non-technical ways in
which you can help.

Support for GNU Guix is part of the FSF's
Working Together for Free Software initiative, a broad campaign
to connect software freedom advocates with projects that need their
help. Other projects that have benefited from this program include the
Replicant free mobile operating system, and the federated Web
media-publishing platform GNU MediaGoblin.